I thought the global warming/cooling mass extermination of the dinosaur/old growth trees/dodos were caused by the fact that King Henry the 8th farted when Anne Boleyn was beheaded. Or was it when Marie Antoinette was thought to have said "let them eat cake". No maybe it was Galileo who sneezed on one of his writings and when he wiped off a very large booger he cause everyone to think the Earth was NOT the center of the universe. Or maybe it was Da Vinci telling a slightly off color job about a Nigerian banker wanting to complete a simple finical transaction that caused the Mona Lisa only slightly smile at his joke. No wait I forgot about Chinese invented fireworks and the smoke they produced caused a butterfly in in Egypt to flap it's wings just right to bury the Sphinx. Or was it the Mongol hordes with all those horse and the methane they produced that caused Marco Polo to bring back the spaghetti to Italy to say the precious food?
So it can't be Columbus' fault. The poor guy just got lost and thought it was on the other side of the world simple enough for anyone to do.

What I have always found interesting is how people react when someone has a different option of someone / something. My experience is many people , no I won't give a percentage because I am being a generalist about this, reacted as if they were just insulted by any disagreement no matter how simple it may be. Shockly enough it's even worse on the internet. If I disagree with anyone I get to do that since I am unique. Not everyone has to agree with everything and if someone disagrees with you that is just fine. Now let's all put our big boy and girl panties on and use what little God given common sense exists among us to understand there are things in the world that are just wrong. But since people go rabid foaming at the mouth mad when someone says "I really don't get two rat farts about Steve Jobs, don't get me wrong it is a sad time for the family and I send my honest condolences and respect their privcy in this personal matter, but I really don't give a frack about his life or the products he touted."

eldavojohn writes: While the jocks who beat you up in high school succumb to March Madness, Suvudu decided to have a tournament worthy of nerd attention. Enter your 32 favorite fantasy characters bracketed up with entertaining paragraphs estimating how the fight will go. From Aragorn to Rand Al'Thor to Cthulhu, vote and comment on your favorite powerhouse fantasy character to win 2010's Suvudu Cage Match!Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes: A mysterious bug leads to a broken API, forcing one developer down a slippery slope into Win32 debugging hell. Read how a fundamental security change introduced with Windows Vista — and carried forward to Windows 7 — is tripping-up ISVs everywhere and causing some large IT shops to slow down their migration plans.Link to Original Source

Hugh Pickens writes: "Network World reports that former National Security Agency technical director Brian Snow told the RSA Conference that cryptographers for the NSA have been losing ground to their counterparts in universities and commercial security vendors for 20 years but still maintain the upper hand in the sophistication of their crypto schemes and in their ability to decrypt. "I do believe NSA is still ahead, but not by much — a handful of years," says Snow. "I think we've got the edge still." Snow added that that in the 1980s there was a huge gap between what the NSA could do and what commercial encryption technology was capable of. "Now we are very close together and moving very slowly forward in a mature field." The NSA has one key advantage with their deep staff of Ph.D. mathematicians and other cryptographic experts who work on securing traffic and breaking codes. "We cheat. We get to read what [academics] publish. We do not publish what we research," says Snow. Snow's claim of NSA superiority seemed to rankle some members at the conference. Adi Shamir, the "S" in the RSA encryption algorithm and a computer science professor at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science, says when the titles of papers in NSA technical journals were declassified up to 1983, there were none that included public key encryption. "That demonstrates that NSA was behind," says Shamir although Snow replied that when technologies are developed separately in parallel, the developers don't necessarily use the same terms for them."

doug141 writes: The Jetpack is constructed from carbon fiber composite, has a dry weight of 250 lbs (excluding safety equipment) and measures 5 ft high x 5.5 ft wide x 5 ft long. It's driven by a 2.0 L V4 2 stroke engine rated at 200 hp (150 kw), can reach 8000 ft (estimated) and each of the two 1.7 ft wide rotors is made from carbon / Kevlar composite. At $86,000 it is pitched at the level of a high-end car. As sales and production volume increase they expect this to drop to the price of a mid-range car. A 10% deposit buys you a production slot for 12 months hence; progress payments are made during manufacture with final payment due on delivery.Link to Original Source

daboochmeister writes: The Register notes what many of us have pointed out for some time, that Windows users are left vulnerable simply because there's no effective, practical approach to ensuring that ALL of the software on a Windows PC is updated with security patches. If only there were a, umm, canonical approach to keeping all software updated, some of us would be apt to get excited!Link to Original Source

This last one is where we run into problems. We really don't have them.

Well not really the numbers are made up and there is plenty of evidence from the emails that those so called scientist wanted the numbers to reflect what Al Gore and his hippies wanted to say.

In case you don't understand it is a pure political cause. Marxist/fascist wanting to rule the world with fear and terror.

If you go in with bad data you can make anything possible. Since there has been more than one real scientist to say the data does not make their observations it makes the whole of the climate argument false. Period. Full stop.

We have no evidence that what is happening isn't supposed to happen changes in the Sun's helo sphere, Earth's orbit, forest fires, volcanoes there is a lot going on on this great big blue marble.

Humanity is a pretty important part of life on this planet but honestly people are pretty insignificant, I point to the idiots screaming the sky is falling.. errr global warming as examples

Yell louder and use more CaPItAL LEtteRS and people will take you seriously.

The one thing I miss about real science was the the ability for people to develop hypothesis's go out and test them with valid test and have others perform independent tests and everyone go back and look at the results and then if the results don't match the hypothesis you change the hypothesis go back and retest and review , retest and review until the data supports a hypothesis than then can be a theory and more testing and more reviewing. Kinda of crazy notion huh.

There is no science for this myth of global warming and just calling it a new name doesn't make it right either. There is no way to take the data and say what the Earth's normal temperature should be. The only climate change we have is called SEASONS and every year it can be different. There Earth drifts a little bit closer to the Sun, a lot of volcanic activity, massive forest fires all of these have happened in the past affecting the climate and the Earth did pretty well to recover.
For all of you so called global warming "scientists" out there drinking the blue cool aid and getting 10 seconds of fame on some news shows you are idiots now and forever more.

Manilus writes: "Scientists on the hunt for what piques sperm whales appetites unexpectedly netted an almost 20 feet long, 103 pound Giant Squid. This is only the second specimen of its type to be found in the Gulf with the first being found near the Mississippi River Delta in 1954."Link to Original Source

sparhawktn writes: A second, lighter-weight test rover has entered the testing setup at JPL where rover team members are assessing strategy for getting Spirit out of soft soil where it is embedded on Mars.... While the primary test rover's weight on Earth is greater than Spirit's weight on Mars, the second rover is even lighter on Earth and closer to the weight of Spirit on Mars.